A black conservative's place for independent thinking and common sense -- A little oasis for those who got caught up in the momentum of the civil rights movement, but failed to discern the false from the true

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I never understood just what the problem was between the liberals who control the Democratic party and John Edwards and his populist message. Why was he not their ideal candidate?

Michael Brendan Dougherty offers his take on what went wrong with the Edwards candidacy in "Progressively Irrelevant" (The American Conservative, 2/11/08). He tells of dead coalitions that cannot be revived and of an altered social and political world. "The problem for Edwards was that progressives and only progressives embraced him," writes Dougherty. In 2004, when Edwards first ran for the presidential nomination, he won the South Carolina primary. He got half the white vote and over a third of the black vote. But this time around, in South Carolina, he won only 2% of the black vote and did not do well among the working whites who earn under $30,000, a major target of his campaign. Edwards' populist appeal failed spectacularly, claims Dougherty, because "the Democratic coalition he sought to capture has changed dramatically from the time of the New Deal and cannot be reconstituted."

That liberal alliance, which once consisted of rural whites, trade unionists, European immigrants, and recently enfranchised blacks, no longer exists. Dougherty explains: "Today, where the party is white, it is less working class. Where it is working class, it is less organized and more divided into competing racial categories. Where it is unionized, it is not private-sector and is thus less insecure about its economic future."

It's been obvious for some time that it's a new day in the story of unions and organized labor. In 1960, 37% of private-sector workers were unionized, but by 2003, this figure had dropped to just over 8%. Dougherty reports that public-sector unions now make up half of organized labor. These people are teachers, policemen, firemen, and government bureaucrats, who have guaranteed pensions and other perks. "Whereas the old power of organized labor appealed to an American sense of fairness in sharing wealth, the new public-sector dominated unions seek only to expand their benefits and insulate themselves from private competition."

Not to be overlooked is the decline in Democratic allegiance among white men, a pattern that has been going on since the days of John F. Kennedy. In 2004, only 36% of this demographic voted for John Kerry. Dougherty observes: "As Thomas Edsall has pointed out, since 1960, the Democratic share of voters employed in the professions 'has doubled from 18% to 35%, whereas the share of the Democratic vote made up of lower-income skilled and non-skilled workers has dropped from 50% to 35%.'"

And then there are those "values" voters, who don't easily fit into economic categories. These are liberals who are committed to particular social ideals and a host of beliefs and behaviors that are the result of the sexual revolution. Dougherty suggests that Edwards lost out among this group, because he demonstrated reticence about such issues as gay rights, which "makes him an oddity in elite Democratic circles."

Without the old alliances and coalitions to help him, "Edwards found out the hard way that the past is useless to a Democratic nominee." Both political parties have been transformed by what Dougherty calls "the long re-alignment of the South and the Northeast and the migration of the working class to the GOP." Describing Edwards' campaign as "funereal," Dougherty writes, "His defeat in the primaries signals the end of a long-held progressive hope: that the social and racial politics that began tearing apart the FDR coalition could be overcome and a left-liberal majority could again be built out of the white working class, together with blacks, immigrants, and women."

Ancient allegiances have faded away, along with formerly durable political bonds and, as the country's demographics continue to change, there is no chance that old alliances will ever again be reinvigorated. John Edwards and his supporters either could not recognize or could not accept the evidence that an era has come to an end.

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Loss of the Issues & Views website

Due to the fact that the owners of the company that has hosted Issues & Views - The Website, since its creation in 1997, have decided to host only sites in Alaska, the website linked to this blog is probably lost.

Issues & Views - The Website (www.issues-views.com) contained hundreds of articles first printed in the hard copy Issues & Views newsletter (1983 through 2002), along with newer articles composed in the 1990s.

Although the former host has re-directed clicks to the website to this blog, it does not appear that there will be any rescue of the website's files or database. For this reason, surfers looking for issues-views.com are landing on this blog. (The website is currently being cached by Google.)

I have learned that an archived version of the website is available on Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, this last capture was performed in 2008, so it lacks certain minor deletions and editing done in 2009 and 2010. However, anyone searching for a particular article should be able to find it there.

- Elizabeth (issues@issues.cnc.net)

Racism is not "sin"

Over the years, as whites have worked to defend themselves against the charge of "racism," they have validated this slur by giving it greater importance than it deserves, and thereby helped to institutionalize it as the world's greatest "sin." As to genuine sin, harboring negative thoughts concerning some group is much further down the list of human deficiencies than bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg, or hacking to death with machetes the men, women and children of an enemy tribe. Now, those are sins! Seeking to force "diversity" down the throats of an unreceptive segment of society is the religious mission of rabid, agenda-driven ideologues. None of this apparent concern for "social justice" has ever been about virtue. It's about power.

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Jacobs and Potter on the un-American nature of "hate crime" legislation.